...and wants to roll back the 19th amendment. Those darn women be votin' for liberals. This cannot stand, obviously. Meanwhile, Newsmax publishes a piece that's a barely restrained endorsement of a military coup. Well, they should have thought of that before stretching the military so thin with two needless wars, because I tend to think that a military coup requires, you know, military personnel, and I find it hard to believe that the paranoid, high-strung teabaggers aren't going to be able to pacify the nation. Unsurprisingly, these pieces not exactly being shouted down by an angry rightosphere--a quick visit to The Corner (no link from me, thanks), for example, reveals no comments on either piece. I just don't know what to make of this, aside from that some portion of the right is perfectly fine with ignoring the democratic rights of people who disagree with them. This is, alas, not a new story...
I also enjoyed this bit: "[Derbyshire] added that the United States 'got along like that for 130 years,' and added that the Civil Rights Act may also lack value because you 'shouldn't try to force people to be good.'" Oh, Lord. I call foul. I've heard this at times from some conservative sources, and it's nonsense. The Civil Rights movement wasn't about forcing (Southern) people to be good. Conservatives who argued that way always missed the point. The point was that black people were denied basic human freedoms and had no way to claim them thanks to a legal framework designed by white supremacists to keep blacks from gaining any political power. There's a really astonishing lack of empathy here, an inability to put one's self into the shoes of the black victims of our own Apartheid system. Not terribly surprising, I suppose, but the truth is that Lyndon Johnson could have given a damn about whether Rufus T. Hicks of Southern Alabama felt the race hatred in his heart. Johnson saw that the real prize was those young black kids who deserved the chance to grow up and to have a chance to be whatever they wanted. Derbyshire is echoing the perennial complaint of white Southerners that Civil Rights was somehow an attack on them. Bullshit, sir. It wasn't. Civil rights was not about them--well it was, to the extent that it was prompted by their abject moral failure to create a just and equitable society, but this notion of Southern victimhood is as pathetic now as it was back in the 60's. Just more evidence that these folks just can't get over themselves, I guess.
But no, there's no racism whatsoever among conservatives enraged at Obama's agenda. We're all colorblind. Nothing more to see here.
